Reaction & Review | Battle Girl: The Living Dead In Tokyo Bay

Welcome, one and all, to an all new Reaction & Review. Tonight, ladies and gentleman, I'm gonna be covering a Japanese zombie movie from 1991. That movie is "Battle Girl: The Living Dead In Tokyo Bay".

Now, I'm gonna be honest with you guys, I don't know a whole lot about this movie. In fact, trying to find any information on this thing was kind of a challenge in of itself, because I really couldn't find any information worth mentioning outside of that lengthy title. You see, the original title of this movie over in Japan was called "Tokyo Crisis Wars". But for some reason, they changed that when they released this movie in the U.S. to a rather lengthy title that I'm surprised I was able fit all of that into Deviantart's limited title space. I don't know why they changed the title, but honestly, I don't really care. As long as I'm able to fit the title in, then that's all that really matters to me.

Now, the only other thing that I know about this movie is that, as I just stated a moment ago, this thing is a zombie movie. And zombie movies have been rather hit or miss when it comes this series. More so leaning towards miss than hit. Because on one hand, I'm able to count off the good zombie movies I covered such as "Pro Wrestlers vs. Zombies" and "Dead & Breakfast". On the other side of that coin, I'm able to list off terrible shit such as "Zombies vs. Strippers", "Anna and the Apocalypse", and "Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad". So yeah, so far, zombie movies have been kinda underwhelming.

I'm certainly hoping that this movie is going to change that by being rather decent. I have no idea if it's gonna be any good, but there is that chance that it could be good. And the only way I'm gonna find out if this movie is any good or not, is if I shut up, and I push play, and I'm gonna do that right now. So, without further ado, it's time to kick back, relax, and check out "Battle Girl: The Living Dead In Tokyo Bay".

6 minutes later

I just saw a dog get electrocuted to death. At least, I think I did. Because the movie didn't really show the dog getting electrocuted, it just gave out some static noise as the camera cut away from it before cutting back, showing the dog's crispy corpse. It was kinda unnecessary, and I feel really sorry for that poor dog, too.

15 minutes later

You know, guys, we're barely over 20 minutes into the movie, and I still haven't been given a reason to care about anything as to what's been going on. And considering that the movie is less than 75 minutes long, and the fact that this movie has a ton of padding, isn't really helping things. I'm certainly hoping that the movie's gonna get more interesting sooner rather than later. But at this point, I'm kinda having my doubts.

12 minutes later

OK, guys, I was sorta hoping that I wouldn't have to bring this up until the review, but I'm gonna have to bring it up now. The subtitles for this movie are poorly utilized. Why is it that almost every time I see someone use an 'I" in a sentence, it instead replaces or adds the number "1" to it? It makes no fucking sense at all! And I'm gonna take a wild guess here and say that these subtitles aren't from the official versions I'd see on DVD or Blu-ray because I'm watching this movie off of YouTube. And whoever did these subtitles really did a poor at fixing certain words that are easy to understand. Just thought I'd share that with you guys, because it's really beginning to bug me.

16 minutes later

You know, guys, I'd probably care more about this guy's death, but since his character has been so fucking shallow and pointless, I'm left with no fucks to give. So, you know what? I can't entirely say that I feel sorry for him.

8 minutes later

So not only did this guy from the Human Hunter Unit just do a swinging back breaker to K-ko, but he also just did a fucking Tombstone Piledriver to her as well! You know what? As sad as this might sound, that is probably the best thing that has happened in this entire movie so far. And I'm saying that, mainly because I am a fan of wrestling. So I may as well just take what I can from this movie in terms positives.

The Review

Well, guys, that was "Battle Girl: The Living Dead In Tokyo Bay". Let me go ahead and shut the movie off...OK. So...where to even start? You know, I kinda wanted this movie to be interesting. Even though it is another zombie movie, I was sorta hoping that it would, at least, be decent. However, that's not the case. This movie is just fucking dull and boring as shit.

Why don't we just start with the writing, shall we? This movie is, very much, a standard, by the numbers zombie movie. It's not really doing anything new or different that I would see from other zombie films. And honestly, I would've not minded any of that. Now yes, while I am tired of the same formulaic shit with zombies, you could've still made it work as long as the story is interesting, and if it were given more time. Because one of the biggest problems that this movie suffers from is the runtime. This movie clocks in at only 73 minutes long. And for a movie like this, it desperately needed more time to flesh out it's story. Because a lot of what happens in this movie is just unnecessary padding. And when you have padding like this in your movie, you really don't have a whole lot of time to boil up a slower-paced story. Now admittedly, it's not as bad as something, like, "Batman: The Killing Joke", where the first 30 minutes of that movie had nothing to do with the actual Killing Joke story, and the rest of the 45 minutes afterwards is just, more or less, a condensed version of Alan Moore's story. But this movie certainly ranks high up there in terms of awful pacing. I really couldn't think of any zombie movie that would be able to work with such a short runtime, because a lot of the ones that I've run into would usually rank around 90 minutes long. If this movie were given about 20, maybe, 30 minutes more to work with, then I think it would've been a hell of a lot better. But unfortunately, with the way that it is, the current runtime is definitely what hurts this movie the most.

As for our characters, well, honestly, almost nobody here has any real depth or personality to speak of. In fact, out of all the zombie movies that I've seen up until this point, this one, probably, has the least amount of depth that I've seen from just about any of them. And that's a real shame, because even the bad ones that I've seen had sprinkles of depth to them, but this movie does not have very much of that, if any. When any characters end up dying, you're not gonna feel a thing for them, because you're not given a reason to care about them. The biggest example of this is when we first meet this trio known as the Battle Kids. And before you assume anything, no, they are not actual kids. MAYBE they're teenagers, but I couldn't really confirm that. So anyway, when you first meet them, they come across as assholes to our main character, K-ko, who was trying to hitch a ride on their van, and their response is to shoot her off, despite the fact that she's not a zombie. And we don't hear from them again up until the last third of the movie. So when K-ko ends up reuniting with them again, they are trying to get back to their van after the trio ends up to where they gotta deliver some stuff. But, lull and behold, the zombies are there, and our cast of characters end up retreating. One of them ends up getting mauled by the zombies after stupidly tripping over himself. And I mentioned it earlier, but I did not care about his death, because he was given no depth or personality to his character. And the funny thing about all this is that two males of the Battle Kids are the ONLY ones who have names. One of them was Sabu, who was the one that gets killed off first, and then the other was Toru, who also gets killed off by one of the special units from the Human Hunter Unit. The female with the green wig, however, DOESN'T get name dropped whatsoever. And for some reason, SHE'S the one who ends up surviving with K-ko in the end, despite the fact that we know nothing about her character, or even what her name is!

While I'm on that subject, K-ko is, honestly, the only one who has any kind of depth in this movie. Which isn't saying a whole lot, mind you, since her character is pretty damn boring as well, but at least she has some semblance of depth. Basically, she was given orders from her father, Colonel Kirihawa, from a video that she has to rescue the remaining survivors from any refugee camps that survived this virus that came from a meteor, who haven't been turned into zombies. And she must get them to a ship that will leave the Takeshiba Pier at 8:00 AM where her father will be waiting for her. But at the same time, she also has to contend with the Human Hunter Unit. A unit that was put together by our villain named Captain Fujioka. And they're ordered to wipe out anyone, be it human or zombie, from reaching the pier. Now, like I said, all this would've been perfectly fine, if it were given a longer runtime and our characters were more fleshed out. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen. Not only do our characters suck, but the ending is even dumber. Now, I am gonna have to spoil this part, so if you have any curiousity in watching this movie, then you might want to stop reading right here or just skip over to the next section. So anyway, towards the end of the movie, when K-ko reunites with her father and tells him that she has eliminated the Human Hunter Unit, he tells her that she has 2 weeks to confirm the killings AND she has to rescue the rest of the refugees that remain from any refugee camps that are still active, and bring them back to the pier on the last ship that will be used to transport them to safety. A big question I have about that is how the hell is she even going to confirm that she killed the Human Hunter Unit? It really doesn't make any sense, unless if you're suppose to, like, gather their bodies and bring them to him or something. Which still doesn't make much sense, but whatever. Point is, this movie feels incredibly rushed. Which makes sense, given it's current runtime, and there should've been much more to this. But as is, it's a very rushed movie that's given little time to work with.

So, writing overall, is mostly not very good. Now, as for the acting, well...it's OK. Honestly, the acting isn't horrible, but it isn't great either. Now, mind you, since I did mention the subtitles earlier, I did watch this movie with it's original Japanese audio. So I have to judge the acting from the version that I watched. And like I just said, it's not the best acting I've seen from a Japanese movie, but it's certainly nowhere near the worst. So, I can, at least, say that the acting here is just OK for what it is.

Since I just mentioned it, I want to talk about how the subtitles are handled in this movie. First of all, I will say that the subtitles are timed very well, and a lot of the English words are spelled perfectly fine. But then there are those moments in the subtitles where there is quite a number of spelling mistakes and grammar issues that makes me believe that this movie was just poorly subtitled. For example, I brought this up earlier, but there are certain words in this movie where the letter "I" is either replaced with the number "1", or it's added in there for no reason whatsoever. When K-ko first gets her orders from her father from the disk, instead of saying "I will be automatically informed of the activation of this disk", the subtitles start it with "1 will be automatically informed of the activation of this disk". Or when K-ko confronts one of Captain Fujioka's soldiers, one sentence of his dialogue translates it as "1-I don't know!". Again, I must ask WHY is there a "1" included in these subtitles? There's no way in hell someone would easily make that kind of mistake in mistaking "1" with "I"! It just looks really fucking stupid. There are also the simpler words such as "is" and "in" that are both spelled "js" "and "jn". Why the fuck you mispell those words with a "J" of all things makes no sense whatsoever. And as for grammar issues, well, it's really more about certain words that are, for some strange reason, mixed into one word instead of two. For example, one character would normally say "Come on!" But instead, the subtitles mix in the two words as one, which makes it into "Comeon!" Or at another point, when K-ko tells the nameless female character with the green wig to shoot one of their friends before he turns into a zombie, she tells twice her to "do it". And in both times, the subtitles combine both words as "Doit"! My guess is that the person who uploaded this movie didn't really take the time to properly fix these subtitles before they uploaded it onto YouTube. And what's funny about all this is that the captions on YouTube are in English. If that's the case, then this movie has some pretty broken English. And I sincerely hope that these poorly done subtitles are not an issue on DVD or Blu-ray. Because if they are, then nobody gave a fuck about giving out proper subtitles for this movie.

Special effects are pretty decent. For a low budget movie, at least I'm going to assume it's low budget, they're OK. The zombie makeup is decent. Blood effects are meh, and they kinda suck. Most of it is green blood, because that's what the zombies blood are made out of in this movie, so, at least, we have that. Costuming here is OK, the fight choreography is mostly shit, save for one bit of it towards the end where K-ko gets done in with a couple of wrestling maneuvers. Funnily enough, I didn't know about this until later on while watching the movie, but I found out that the main star of this movie goes by the name of Cutie Suzuki, who use to be a former professional wrestler. So I guess it would make sense that I saw a couple of wrestling moves in this movie. She doesn't use any moves herself in this movie, but still, at least it was sorta cool to learn about that. But regardless of her wrestling status, the fight choregraphy is still mostly poorly done here.

Camerawork here is decent. Lighting in this movie is, for about, 93% of it, has a lot of darkness. And I get that they wanted to reflect the mood of this movie being in an apocalyptic zombie setting, but the amount of darkness that's in this movie is just kinda depressing to watch. And I obviously don't mean that in a good way. Sound-mix here is OK. The score is fucking bland and forgettable as shit. So there's nothing about the music that I would consider to be even remotely memorable.

So, when everything is said and done, guys, can I recommend "Battle Girl: The Living Dead In Tokyo Bay"? Um...honestly, no. Mind you now, even though this movie is about 73 minutes long, there's really nothing about that short runtime that's gonna make this thing worth sitting through. Our characters are mostly fucking shallow and lifeless, our story is just another been there, done that, zombie movie, and the film is just fucking boring as shit. I really wanted to see if this movie would kinda lean towards being a decent zombie flick, however, I've been proven wrong again, and it's just another shitpile I can add to the actrocious zombies I've covered for this series. And there are far better zombies you could be watching. Speaking of which, I mentioned "Dead & Breakfast" at the start of this thing, so I'm gonna go watch that next. And funnily enough, it's been almost a year since the anniversary that I covered that movie for Reaction & Review. So, I'm gonna go do that next, because I need to watch a better zombie film than the one I just sat through for 73 minutes.

Anyway, guys, with that, we come to the close of another Reaction & Review. Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, take care, and I will see you all later. Peace.